Archive for the ‘LeTourneau’ tag

Commenter Timothy Wade chided us earlier this year (good-naturedly, of course) for not doing our research on the Mack T8 double-ender tank transporter that we linked to on BigLorryBlog. Well, the perfect time to present the findings of said research is now, the day we kick off our fourth annual March Military Campaign.

According to Crismon, the T8 actually had its genesis early in 1942, when the Army approached Cook Brothers (Allied Machinery manufacturing Company) in Los Angeles. Cook Brothers had already developed a four-wheel-drive chain-driven bogie used in a couple 8×8 vehicles (the T55 and an undesignated desert training vehicle), and now the Army wanted the company to engineer a double-articulated tank transporter using those bogies. Artists at the Detroit Arsenal sketched those designs, designated the T1, and, according to Crismon’s description:

At 46 feet long, 10 feet wide, 12.5 feet high when carrying an M4 medium tank, it would have weighed 30 tons net, and 70 tons with maximum payload. The cabs and gunner’s positions were to have been armor plated. It was to have used 18.00×24 tires, and the rear unit would detach itself to allow loading or unloading. Two winches were to be mounted on the gooseneck of the platform section. Each unit was to be powered by a Hall-Scott 400 engine with a Spicer fluid coupling and transmission. The chain driven bogies were to be steered by braking, and the rear unit was to have hydraulic jacks for lifting the rear end of the platform.

Though the Army Corps of Engineers thought it too large and too heavy, Cook Brothers received an order for two T1s in May 1943 and began construction on the first. However, a rival design beat the T1 to the punch.

After yesterday’s post about the LeTourneau road trains, our pal Gary Faules emailed us up to share some photos of another LeTourneau with which he had first-hand experience.

My father had a personal relationship with the LeTourneaus for many years. As a matter of fact you may be interested in learning about a vehicle which LeTourneau custom built back in 1954 after some brain-storming with my father for my father to use in his logging mill in Southwestern Oregon.

It was called the LeTourneau Skidder and used to drag logs back from rugged areas to be loaded on logging trucks. Attached are three photos taken in 1955 of my father who also operated it. (Sorry for the poor quality.) Believe it or not this rig was so big andÂ noisy for it’s day, that most men were afraid to operate it in the forest mountains. I remember seeing it run as a boy when I was only 5 years old and it scared the hell out of me not only because of the noise but because of how the ground shook before it even came into view.

Here are some sats;

It was considered an “All-Electric” vehicle.

It weighed 30 tons.

It had;
4 D.C. Electric Motors
7 A.C. Electric Motors
Both of which were run by 2 Generators

The generators were powered by a 280 h.p. Supercharged Buda engine. (The history of Buda engines is very interesting in it’s self.)

The tires were huge for their day as well; They were 6 foot tall and 3 foot wide.

The steering was also electric.

It’s capacity was over 10,000 foot of logs per load.

The overall width was 12 foot wide.

The drivers seat was located 10 feet from the ground.

Top speed was 15 miles per hour but my father told me the main reason he had to park it after a short trial period was it was simply because back then the ride was so rough it was almost impossible for a man to handle the banging around in the cab.

It was then parked on a logging site on my father’s ranch and never used again and it still sits there to this day all grown over with timber.

It may very well be that the Faules family’s Skidder was the first LeTourneau logging truck. According to Orlemann, LeTourneau didn’t introduce its popular log-stacking line until 1955, a full year after the company delivered the Skidder to Gary’s father.

So if you happen to be strolling through the Oregon woods and see a huge noggin’-bashin’ machine that would give The Iron Giant nightmares, this might just be what you’ve come across.

We have our friends at BigLorryBlog to thank for posting a vintage ad the other day that sent us seeking information about the longest vehicles of all time that ended up providing parts for the most beloved monster truck of all time: the LeTourneau land trains, built to access the most remote reaches of the arctic and to dwarf just about any other land vehicle in both size and sheer testicular fortitude.

Originally conceived to assist logging in trackless wilderness, LeTourneau, famed for its earthmovers, devised the first of its land trains, the VC-12 Tournatrain, in 1953-1954 with a lead cab and three trailers. A 500hp Cummins diesel powered a generator that then fed electric motors at each wheel, thus spreading the power application across 16 wheels to enhance traction. A later iteration of the Tournatrain added a second Cummins and four more trailers to put 32 drive wheels to the ground.

Though pitched to the Army, LeTourneau never found a buyer for the VC-12. The Army did, however, offer to fund the 1954 TC-264 Sno-Buggy, an eight-wheeled super-sized Tonka toy that used a butane-fired Allison engine to run the generators that fed power to four electric motors. A four-wheeled, non-powered trailer went with it.